The Story of Milan

by Ella Noyes

Restorations and continual repairs have almost effaced the handiwork of the original builders. The north-east part of the exterior is the most ancient. The three magnificent windows of the apse, with their rich tracery, are one of the most beautiful features of the original design. And amid the swarms of baroque saints, in every contorted attitude of theatric sentiment, which have settled on this part, as everywhere over the building—four thousand four hundred and forty, outside and in, they say—a patient observer may pick out some which, by their dignified simplicity, refinement and repose, show the purer taste of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The lowest figures on the northernmost window of the apse are an Adam and Eve, and have been attributed to Antonio Rizzo, a fifteenth century Venetian sculptor, known by his work in the cortile of the Doge’s Palace. Cristoforo Solari, Andrea Fusina, Tomaso da Cazzaniga, il Bambaia, are all represented by sculptures on the apse. Higher up are works by earlier and less accomplished hands, huge gargoyles of fantastic form—dragons, a serpent coiled round the nude body of a woman, a child entwining itself with a bough, a female figure with great curling hair, a siren with bat’s wings—monstrous creations of the Northern fancy, which dominated in the first years of the Cathedral. Beneath these gargoyles are ranged the so-called Giganti, colossal statues of warriors, heralds, huntsmen, foresters, slaves—figures of romance and of the rude fields too. Some are by German sculptors, and by Lombards under their influence; others of rather later date show new and realistic tendencies.

There is little of interest on the south side and in the lower end of the exterior. The monotonous length of the vast flanks is unbroken by the rich interest of doorways, such as were originally projected. The classic façade is frankly discordant, though it is no less thickly littered with bad sculptures. The bronze doors of the middle entrance are a very recent work, showing the hark back of the modern sculptor to Quattrocento models. But if the exterior of the Duomo lacks in impressiveness, the interior makes amends. Wonder and awe overwhelm one on entering. In the dim religious light from the great stained windows, one is aware of vast echoing aisles, of mighty columns passing away, one behind the other, into depths and distances of rich gloom, where the pointed lines of arch behind arch become visible, broken by long slits of glowing glass. A quiet reigns as of places untrodden by earthly things. Pigmy human forms creep here and there over the immense expanses of the pavement, or kneel at the foot of a column, bowed in devotion.

In this solemn interior it seems as if the native and foreign ideals had united for once, with harmonious result. Here is the breadth and spaciousness of Latin thought—the loftiness of Gothic. With its five aisles, transepts and apsidal east end, the church is of striking simplicity. There are no chapels built out, few side altars, and few monuments. The High Altar, with its canopy, and the florid pulpits and marble screen round the sanctuary, are the only conspicuous objects. There is little incident in the building itself. A feeling gains upon one, after a time, of a certain emptiness, monotony, even poverty, in all this grandeur of height and space. The inadequacy of the short light arches of the nave, in comparison with the colossal shafts supporting them becomes visible, and the eye is offended by the shameless deception of the roof, which is painted to simulate open tracery, and give a false effect of added height. The endless repetition of line and arch ends by being wearisome, and one longs for the rich symmetric light and shade of triforium and clerestory, for the beautiful mouldings, the star blackness of trefoil and quatrefoil piercings, and for all that deep and varied interest which grows upon the eye slowly, and in just relation to general effect, in the best Gothic architecture. The curious and elaborate capitals, like huge rings, are the most conspicuous details here. Each in itself is a wonderful piece of Gothic ornament, with arcades and crocketed pinnacles and niches filled with statues, but they are so high up that one can hardly appreciate them in detail. As capitals, one must quarrel with them. They do not seem natural members of the columns, but things put on merely for effect, and look as if they were meant to slip up and down, and might be at the bottom as well as at the top. That on the great pier to the left of the High Altar is said to be the handiwork of Heinrich von Gmünd, and to have been the model of the rest. The statues which decorate the lofty interior of the cupola, high up, are in the characteristic manner of the late fifteenth century Lombard sculptors, and the busts of the Fathers of the Church in the spandrils are by Cristoforo Solari. The rest of the ornamentation in the church is mostly of the Borromean and later periods. It is the ascetic cardinal’s fault that all the picturesque incrustations which had gathered upon the old building, with priceless historic associations, are missing. He ruthlessly swept away the shades of the rich and lively past, its profanities and sincerities together. The tombs of the old Lords of Milan, Visconti and Sforza, in the ambulatory, were cleared away, and other monuments were destroyed or displaced in too zealous obedience to the decree of the Council of Trent, forbidding the burial of bodies in monuments in churches. The doors in the transepts were walled up, and his favourite sculptor, Pellegrino Tebaldi, a belated follower of Michaelangelo, whose neo-classic predilections were in utter disaccord with the spirit of the building, was set to work to re-garnish its devastated spaces.

WITHIN THE DUOMO.

There are no paintings of account in the church. The few pictures belong to the same period as the altars, designed by il Pellegrini, over which they hang. The original Gothic design did not admit of frescoes on the walls. The necessary colour is given by the windows. In many of these the glass is modern, but some very fine fifteenth and sixteenth century glass still survives. It has not the supreme beauty of very early glass; the designs are pictorial, but the colour is gorgeously rich and deep, and in the earlier ones the subjects are treated with due regard for decorative effect.

A few things of interest may indeed be found in the vast spaces of the nave and ambulatory. Low down against the north wall is the rude granite tomb of Archbishop Ariberto, eleventh century, brought hither in 1783 from the suppressed Church of St. Dionysius. The ancient crucifix of Byzantine style above it, upon the foot of which is a relief of Ariberto holding a model of St. Calimero, a church restored by him, is said, but without foundation, to be the crucifix which used to be carried into battle on the Caroccio. Beneath a window further up stands a sarcophagus, raised upon columns of Verona marble; in it are the bones of the two Visconte Archbishops, Otto, Lord of Milan in the thirteenth century, and his great grand-nephew Giovanni, who ruled See and city in the first half of the fourteenth, and who elected to be laid with his great predecessor when he died. The recumbent statue of Giovanni on the top is probably by a Campionese master. This monument, which had once an honourable place in the apse, is the only memorial in the church of the great family which founded it. Higher up is the Gothic tomb of Marco Caselli, a merchant who died in 1394, and gave his large fortune to the building of the Cathedral. The tomb was designed by Filippino da Modena, but the recumbent statue and the figures of Evangelists and Fathers on the front and sides are by another hand, a Venetian or a Lombard influenced by the Venetian school.[^[4]] We come next to a refined little sixteenth century monument to Giovanni Antonio Vimercati, by Agostino Busti, il Bambaia. Three altars designed by il Pellegrini follow. Over the last there is a bas-relief of Madonna with SS. Catherine and Paul, a poor and primitive work by one Jacomolo di Antonio (1495), recently placed here.

[4]. Malaguzzi Valeri, Milano, vol. i. p. 73.

In the south transept the beautiful window over the door into the street is mainly the work, much mutilated and added to, of Michelino da Besozzo in 1438. Here on the west side is a great monument by Leone Leoni of Arezzo, a disciple of Michaelangelo, to Gian Giacomo de’ Medici, brother of Pius IV., a princely pirate who terrorised Lake Como and led his undisciplined troops in the service now of one, now of the other of the combatants struggling for North Italy in the sixteenth century, till Charles V. compounded with him by creating him Marquis of Melegnano. On the east side is an altar with a relief of the Presentation of the Virgin, and statues by the school of il Bambaia. A statue close by representing St. Bartholomew flayed is admirable only for the impudence of the inscription on it—‘Non me Praxitiles, sed Marcus finxit Agrates.’ Marco Agrate was one of the crowd of early sixteenth century Lombard sculptors who helped to people the Duomo with statues. This one was originally on the exterior of the church.

The choir in its present form is due to Pellegrini, whose assistants executed the grandiose work after his designs. It is enclosed by a high marble screen, which is sculptured on the side towards the ambulatory with reliefs of the life of the Virgin and decorative figures of late Renaissance style. Two extremely ornate gilded pulpits stand in front of the choir, one on each side. The organs are embellished with heavy gilded decoration and paintings by Proccacini and the late Lombard school. The choir has very fine decorative panelling, and the triple row of stalls are of walnut wood very richly carved, those behind showing scenes from the story of St. Ambrose and effigies of the martyrs and saints and prelates of Milan. The bronze ciborium over the altar is a good work of its period; it is in the form of a round temple, and beneath is the richly-ornamented tabernacle given by the Milanese Pope, Pius IV. (1559-65), to the Cathedral.